Lunsford's Music Echoes

by Patty Bily

 

August, 1927. A man in a white, double-breasted suit convinced his city friends in Asheville to rope off part of Pack Square. Friends and neighbors from the Great Smokies and Blue Ridge arrived that first evening "along about sundown." They tuned up, warmed up, then broke into song with "Gray Eagle." They played and danced as they always had in the mountains and at a home in South Turkey Creek. That was Mr. Lunsford's home. And this was Mr. Lunsford's festival.

Lawyer, farmer, newspaper editor, college teacher. These roles Bascom Lamar Lunsford set aside when mountain music was around. The Appalachian tunes had to be preserved, they had to be recorded, but most of all they had to be performed.

People came to the first festival—in droves. By the second year things were getting a bit crowded downtown. Mr. Lunsford moved his festival to a tent on McCormick Field and brought an old oak dancing platform from home. On the baseball infield in 1929 music lovers, old and young, gathered once again.

One of these was an 11-year-old Asheville boy with a harmonica, or "mouth harp." He didn't learn how to play from anyone else, "just picked it up myself," said Walter (Red) Parham. "There was a fellow down there by the name of Melvin Metford. He was playing a harp and I really got carried away with him. I decided that's what I wanted to do." Parham joined the folk festival 49 years ago and helped entertain the audience in the stands. He still remembers those first ones.

"We started with scratch. An old ground-hog banjo and a fiddle and a mouth harp or two and that was all we had." He especially remembers Bascom Lunsford, founder and original M.C. There was no program in those days. Bascom knew instinctively when a performer should go on.

"None of them can do it like he [did] . . . He had a certain place for the man when he needed him. He told me a lot of times . . . 'I do this with my head.'" Whenever Red asked when he should go on, Bascom would just say, "'There's a place in there I need you'" and leave it at that. When the festival started to drag, "'I want you to pep that show back' . . . I admired him for that part. Didn't understand it right on the start, but it's really a good way to do it . . . He didn't have a dull moment."

Red, who soon moved out to the country and bought a farm, traveled with Bascom Lunsford all over the United States. Every time they went somewhere, "no matter where it was, if we got out and walked down the street one hundred feet, there'd be somebody saying, 'Howdy Mr. Lunsford.'" His festival was fast becoming a nationally known event. Location had to be changed again in 1942 for convenience's sake. When the weather "came up with rainstorms or something, you're in trouble. It blowed the tents away down there one time." Also a war sort of interrupted things. But a new auditorium was waiting.

The Asheville City Auditorium housed the festival until 1974. The show hung on even when musical tastes were changing. Some adjustments were necessary, and because of them things were not quite as informal, but Bascom Lunsford made sure there weren't any electronic instruments, over-amplifying, or gaudy sequins at his festival. And, according to Jackie Ward, now coordinator of the show, he very much disliked "the stereotype of mountain people"—the hillbilly. "If the best you had was a pair of overalls, fine, but hold your head up and be proud." Says Red Parham of Bascom, "He was the most determined fellow I ever saw." Indeed, he must have been, because he helped start a dozen more festivals and traveled all over the country, even to the White House.

In 1967, the Chamber of Commerce Folk Heritage Committee, who had been producing the show, started something new. There can only be so much down-home feeling in a formal auditorium that one pays to get in. Shindig-on-the-Green took up the void—free to the public, open to everyone. The money needed to put it on came from "proceeds above the cost of producing the festival," Ms. Ward explained. The mountain music program started out small, like the festival, those first summer Saturdays. "The first year, I think peak audience would have been . . . one hundred people," but after that "it just caught on."

Bascom Lunsford died in 1973. Jackie Ward remembers him "just a few months before he died" when he was 91 and having a very hard time getting around. "I went over to his little apartment . . . I called to say I was coming a few days in advance . . . When I got there that man [was] out of his bed (his wife Freda undoubtedly helped with all this). He was sitting there . . . in his living room in his white suit, and starched, absolutely stiff, white shirt."

The Folk Heritage Committee carried on, and made an apprehensive move to the Civic Center arena when the Asheville auditorium was torn down. Their fears were justified. The sound system was terrible. "Really an arena isn't built for a folk festival or a music show . . . unless you've got $3000 to spend on sound." Fortunately, the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium was ready for the 1977 show. "The auditorium has always been our home."

It was the location also for the 1978 show August 3, 4, and 5, which drew more people than ever before. The place was almost full Thursday night, completely full Friday, and overflowing Saturday. The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival went on stage for the 51st time thanks to a completely volunteer committee working year round. These people are out to preserve, and the "best way to preserve is to provide a stage. Performers need and want a stage."

The performers this time included bands, old time and bluegrass; clogging and square dance teams; The Bantry Band with its Irish songs; ballad singers; Ken Harrison on musical saw; Red Parham on mouth harp; and Phil and Gaye Johnson on guitar, mandolin, slide dobro, and harmonica.

It started out, like always, with "Gray Eagle," played by the 40-year-old Bear Creek Ramblers band. Two buck dancers, one old, one young, thumped to the music. Then the program—and the competitions—got underway. A few of the same faces show up every year. Jacob Fisher, at 84, is the only man still alive to have been at all the festivals (he couldn't, unfortunately, be found for an interview). Bascom Hall had died a month before, having just reached the century mark. He had been in the first fifty festivals. Red Parham (who was quoted earlier) is proud to say that he has been in all but the first two. There is, however, a tremendous range in ages among the participants. The members of the Carolina Cut-Ups are all 18 or younger. Pitted against adults, they won first place as a bluegrass band. Six of the fourteen dance teams had younger members. Says the festival's coordinator, "Without the youth you don't carry on the tradition."

Dancing, especially by the cloggers, had to be the audience's favorite. The Pigeon Valley Cloggers and the Pisgah View Ranch Smooth Dancers both won for the second time in their divisions. They had defended their championships from last year against the winners from Thursday and Friday nights. Other competitions were in bluegrass individual and band, old-time music individual and band, and dance-team callers.

The festival has changed. At first there were no competitions. At first there was no program. At first the show started "along about sundown," not 7 p.m. There weren't costumes; there wasn't an auditorium. It's a shame, in a way, but necessary, says Jackie Ward. "Fifteen, twenty years ago . . . it was just a gathering of people from the county." Now people come from all over the world. An intimate gathering doesn't work too well with thousands of people, and "if you're doing a public performance, audience must come first." Now, also, not everyone can participate. "I'm deluged with people wanting to be in." So she has to choose, and that's "the hardest part." Usually Shindig-on-the-Green down at the City-County Plaza serves as a "proving ground for people who are aiming toward performance in festival."

But good ole competition has helped keep things lively, and has guaranteed that those you see up on stage are the best around. The Folk Heritage Committee has made sure that the judging is fair—especially for the dance division, the most important contest. Ms. Ward explained that "By mid-May I know who the teams are whom I'm inviting, so I call . . . the directors of the teams . . . each director can write in secret . . . suggestions for judges, people that they consider competent." She then makes copies of the list and passes them back out. "Any director can scratch out any name that he or she considers incompetent . . . the paper gets back to me with the names marked, unscratched out. From there the committee chooses judges."

"There are three dance judges and three instrumental judges." They fill out their evaluation on ballot forms. "For instance, with the dance teams, there's a possible 100 points. Certain points are given to things such as team coordination, selection of figures (they have a list of 20 to 25 traditional figures from which to choose)," and many other things that all add up to 100 points.

This is mountain music as it has become. The organization, the planning—all that may be different—but it's the same fiddling and strumming and clogging that the mountain folk have always done. And, thanks to Bascom Lamar Lunsford and the Folk Heritage Committee, you can have three days of it every year, at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the oldest show of its kind in the country.